Swamp Notes: The Fed’s political pressures
FT News Briefing
Forhecz Topher
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The US Federal Reserve is fiercely independent, but that doesn’t mean politicians always treat it that way. The FT’s US national editor, Edward Luce, and acting US economics editor, Claire Jones, join this week’s Swamp Notes to explain how the central bank’s policy could affect the economy and therefore have an impact on the election result. Plus, why a second term for Donald Trump could put pressure on the Fed to play politics.
Mentioned in this podcast:
Jay Powell’s dilemma: the US economy is too strong to cut rates
Global inflation and interest rates tracker: see how your country compares
Sign up for the FT’s Swamp Notes newsletter here
Swamp Notes is produced by Ethan Plotkin, Sonja Hutson, Lauren Fedor and Marc Filippino. Topher Forhecz is the FT’s executive producer. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. Original music by Hannis Brown.
CREDIT: US Federal Reserve
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The UK's energy partner. |
| 0:06.0 | Learn more at equinore. |
| 0:08.0 | Equinore. UK. Voters in the United States often vote based on the state of their wallet. |
| 0:18.0 | It may be no institution does more to shape the economy than the Federal Reserve. |
| 0:25.0 | This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the F.T. |
| 0:31.0 | news briefing where we talk about all the things happening in the |
| 0:34.1 | 2024 U.S. presidential election. I'm Mark Filipino and this week we're asking |
| 0:38.7 | does monetary policy matter in this race? Here with me to discuss is Ed Luce, he's the |
| 0:44.2 | F. T's US national editor. Hi Ed. Hi, good to be with you. Good to have you back. |
| 0:48.9 | And we've also got Claire Jones, the F.T's acting U.S. economics economics editor she covers all things monetary policy. |
| 0:54.7 | Hey Claire. Hello Mark. So Claire I want to start by just kind of getting a lay of the |
| 0:59.3 | macroeconomic land for a second. As we know one of the Fed's primary mandates is to keep inflation low. Its target |
| 1:06.0 | is 2%, it's higher than that right now, and they try to get it down by raising interest rates. |
| 1:12.0 | Do we know what they have planned for the next few months on that front? |
| 1:16.5 | So it's been a crazy couple of years for the Federal Reserve. You've seen the highest inflation |
| 1:22.0 | in decades and the feds have to really respond to that by raising interest rates very very aggressively |
| 1:28.8 | At the turn of the year the sense you got was that you know the central bank could relax a little we'd |
| 1:34.6 | seen inflation drop quite sharply towards the end of last year the expectation |
| 1:39.2 | was that that would continue into this year and that we'd now be in a position where the Federal Reserve would be considering |
| 1:46.2 | rate cuts. |
| 1:47.6 | However, at its meeting last week, the message that we got very loud and clear was that interest rates |
| 1:56.4 | which are now at a 23-year high are going to need to stay higher for even |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Forhecz Topher, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Forhecz Topher and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.